Laneways Here We Come

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The 2011 Laneways Festival line-up was just announced.  Being held on Auckland Anniversary Day (31 January 2011) at the re-christened Aotea Square, this year's announced line-up are: Yeasayer - Foals -Ladyhawke - !!! (CHK CHK CHK) - Deerhunter - Blonde Redhead -Children's Hour - Warpaint - Beach House - Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti- Lawrence Arabia - Holy F*** - An Emerald City.
Acts I'm looking forward to seeing:
This an indie heavyweight line-up for sure, but it does omit lots of great artists that are on the Australian leg of the tour.  Why couldn't Auckland get the insanely amazing Les Savy Fav,  Los Angeles upstarts Local Natives, skewed popsters Menomena, and the cutesy duo of Jenny and Johnny?  Yes, I'll end up going and will probably enjoy myself in the sun(fingers crossed) and sonics of Aotea Square. Although one has to ask, when does Auckland begin to not get the short end of the stick when it comes to Laneways?  Just saying.
 ~Jerome

Making Music in Auckland

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With the vast amount of technically brilliant studio albums released today, the result has been the great improvement and ease of home recording. What used to involve a bedroom full of heavy and expensive analogue equipment is now refined into a laptop with Garageband or Protools. It has become so readily available, anyone with a microphone and a bit of computer know-how can record.
 
All you need next are some songs.
 
And plenty of fellow Aucklanders have swooped on these new opportunities to produce their own music. To encourage this creativity, Auckland City Libraries started the Made In Auckland CD collection, for unsigned artists who do not have the funding to professionally record and distribute their works.
 
The cool thing about Made in Auckland is the CDs are free rentals! They’re also an ideal way to share and archive artists’ work, as we all know by now: itunes hardly caters for tangible album artwork, or familiar names in the credits and thanks notes. So if you have an EP or album that you would like to see stored in hard copy on a shelf, send it in to the Music department.
 
Our latest donations to the collection include quality sounds from The Roulettes, Toi Ora Live Art, and Anna Kaye. Check out the collectionhere, or come into Central Library and have a listen.

There's so much coming and going musically through town right now, we're trying to keep up. Coming up soon on the blog: Metallica, Laneways and Super City Summer Anthems!

 ~Matthew

Making Music Part 2!

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WANT TO WRITE THE SONG OF NZMM 2011?

This awesome opportunity just came through on the wire. If you're a student with a song to sing, enter this competition and be the 2011 NZ Music Month anthem!


 ~Matthew

Big Day Out: First Announcement!

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One of the most important signs of Spring, along with lambs and blossoms, is the first Big Day Out lineup announcement. And man it is a big one!  Tool, Rammstein, Deftones, Iggy and the Stooges, The Black Keys, MIA, LCD Soundsystem, Lupe Fiasco, Grinderman, Andrew WK, Primal Scream, Crystal Castles CSS, Birds of Tokyo, Airbourne, Plan B, Ratatat, John Butler Trio, Wolfmother, Jim Jones Revue, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, Bloody Beetroots Death Crew 77, Booka Shade, Die Antwoord and Vitalic.

Joining this international colossal contingent are a bunch of NZ youngbloods and heavyweights: Shihad, The Naked and Famous, Six60, I Am Giant, Kids of 88, Die!Die!Die!, Bulletproof and Street Chant. If you have read earlier posts you will know about the success of some of these bands at the APRA Silver Scroll Awards.

With Tool, Rammstein, Deftones, and Airbourne covering the main corners of Metal, it's going to be a loud day. But if you're not going to wear a black t-shirt, there's still plenty to choose from. A perfect day of dancing would involve the psychedelic MIA, punk-funkers LCD Soundsystem, sexy CSS with some Ratatat on the side, and of course, Lupe Fiasco.

As usual with BDO, there are quite a few happy returners, like John Butler Trio, who I'm sure will put many in that summer mood. My pick of the day is Grinderman: a reanimated Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, who will definitely rock your face off should you have the courage to get to their front row. I highly suggest you do.

Check out the Catalogue for these artists to prepare for what will be a very fun day. 

~Matthew

NZ Music Awards

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It’s awards season for New Zealand Music again! While Juice TV moved their celebrations to tie in with the end of May’s NZ Music Month, it’s still a Spring party for the prestigious APRA Silver Scroll Awards and Vodafone Music Awards 2010.
 
Last Wednesday at Auckland’s Town Hall, the Australasian Performing Rights Association awarded the Silver Scroll songwriting award to local kids The Naked & Famous for their anthem “Young Blood”. It was an interesting mix of contenders, including the charming Artisan Guns (who kindly performed a free show for us at Central Library in May), Julia Deans, The Mint Chicks and Anika Moa.
 
One of the most interesting elements of each year’s ceremony are the performances of finalist songs by different bands. This year, fellow Aucklanders Street Chant had a lot of fun turning up the volume on Artisan Guns’ “Autumn”. Which points to another noticeable thing about the 2010 awards: it’s great to see the celebration of so many young Auckland bands. It is a testament to how the current music scene here is thriving.

 ~Matthew

Songs about Superheroes

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It's widely known that musicians are some of the biggest geeks in the world (this is meant to be a compliment). So in honour of comic book month at Auckland City Libraries, I've come up with nine songs that mention superheroes or comic books.

1.  Matter-Eater Lad by Guided by Voices.  A song about an obscure Legion of Super Heroes character.
2.  Superman by R.E.M. I am Superman and I can do anything.
3.  Ghost Rider by Suicide.  Also covered by Henry Rollins for the soundtrack of The Crow.

4.  Can U Dig It?  by Pop Will Eat Itself.  We dig Marvel and D.C., Bruce Wayne auf weidersehn, Alan Moore knows the score.
5.  Waiting for a Superman by The Flaming Lips.  Song about the heavy burden of being Superman.  Also covered by Iron and Wine.
6.  I Am the Law by Anthrax.  Every time I think of Judge Dredd, I think of Sylvester Stallone mumbling "I am the law."
7.  That's Really Super, Supergirl by XTC.  That's really super, supergirl, how you're changing all the world's weather, but you couldn't put us back together.
8. Flash Gordon by Queen.  Theme song to one of the cheesiest and campiest movies ever.
9. DC Comics and Chocolate Milkshake by Art Brut.  Because sometimes nothing is ever as good as a good comic book and a milkshake together.

So go out and buy/borrow some comic books, listen to music and be inspired.

 ~Jerome

A little Big Star

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In a very sad year of losing important musicians, another lesser known musician quietly passed with little fanfare.  Andy Hummel, founding bassist of cult 70s power-pop band Big Star, died on the 19th of July.  Andy Hummel's death followed the March passing of Big Star's lead singer and main songwriter, Alex Chilton. 

Never achieving mainstream success, Big Star, in the words of Rolling Stone, released "a seminal body of work that never stopped inspiring succeeding generations".  Combining catchy pop with dark themes,  Big Star would directly influence and make fans of important 80s and 90s indie alternative bands such as REM, Teenage Fanclub, The Lemonheads, and The Replacements. 
 
Although critically acclaimed, Big Star's three records: #1 Record, Radio City, and Third/Sister Lovers were commercially unsuccesful.  It is only through word of mouth by these bands and their loyal fans that renewed interest in the 1980s and 1990s would follow in reissues of the band's catalogue.    Such devoted fans were The Replacements that they wrote and released a song called "Alex Chilton".  This is how I discovered Big Star.  Paul Westerberg sang that he "never travelled far, without a little Big Star".  Thank you Paul, because of you I don't ever travel far without Big Star on my iPod.

Although I own all of their records, you might want to take my advice and borrow Big Star's albums:

They may not change your life but they may change how you listen to music.

~Jerome

NZ Music Month in pictures

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NZ Music Month is over for 2010, so I thought it was time to have a look back at some of our events. If you're anything like me you didn't have time to make it along to everything we had going on. Lucky for us Matthew was on hand throughout the month with a camera. Click the image to enlarge.

New Zealand Music Month - Greg Fleming New Zealand Music Month - Greg Fleming New Zealand Music Month - Tono New Zealand Music Month - Record Club

A massive thanks to everyone who played, and to everyone who came along to listen.

~Ashley

Káren Hunter live at the library

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Karen Hunter. photo care of Karen Hunter.comOn the Saturday 29th May at midday singer songwriter Káren Hunter will perform a solo set at the Central City library.

Káren has been touring round the country this summer to promote her latest album Words & Groove.

Káren has released an incredible eight albums since 1993 and is a prominent figure in the folk/jazz scene in New Zealand. Káren takes song writing workshops and teaches at the University of Auckland on the Popular Music Major of the Bachelor of Music programme where she mentors young performers. Check out the School of Music at the University of Auckland or the Music and Audio Institute of NZ if you're keen to study music. 

This will be the last performance for NZ Music Month at the library, so get down to the library to support New Zealand Music!

Photo Credit http://www.karenhunter.com/

Listen to music online via Naxos

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The library doesn't just offer physical things like manuscripts and CDs to music fans, we also have a solid collection of Music eResources in our Digital Library. During NZ Music Month we're running a special class in one of these resources, the Naxos Music Library. Unfortunately this class is all booked up already, but I'll give you a run down so you can have a browse yourself.

The Naxos Music Library is a collection of music that Auckland City Libraries members can listen to online for free. Just login with your barcode number and PIN and you're hooked up to more than 600,000 tracks streaming in CD or near CD quality.

Naxos, with its excellent classical music content, is perfect for listening to pieces you might need to learn for music lessons or theory tests. The recordings come from all the big classical labels like Chandos Records and Hungaroton, so you know that the recordings are of the top quality.

I don't tend to spin up classical music for much more than soothing background sounds, but one thing that caught my attention was the Pop & Rock section. "Listen to an impressive array of Scandinavian rock and pop music, jazz, indie-pop and folk/acoustic pop," says the catalogue listing, so of course I had to check it out. A quick trawl turned up what seems to be a mash-up of the scores from The Two Towers and Requiem for a Dream, Requiem for a Tower by Clint Mansell of Pop Will Eat Itself. Totally LOL-worthy, and not at all bad.

I also stumbled across some pretty sweet electronic pop by Nashville-ites Venus Hum. Check out 'Pink Champagne', but steer well clear of the remix. You have been warned.

Naxos also has classic and contemporary jazz, folk, blues, world, nostalgia, and even Chinese collection. Jazz, in fact, gets its ownNaxos Jazz Music Library. It's possible to search by country, and yeah, there are some kiwi tracks on there. Have a dig.

If you're already set up to log in to the library website then you have all you need to get on to Naxos. Chuck on some strings while you study, bone up on some classic jazz to match your new beret, or get ready for your next Young Workers' meeting by singing along to some Pete Seeger. It's free music on the internet, imagine that!

~Ashley

Street Dreams CD release in Onehunga

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Street Dreams.
Onehunga is an amazing place. From the buskers outside Countdown, to cars passing you in the street, to the kids with the ukulele that hang out in the library during school holiday, the place is filled with music. The Street Dreams programme is a local initiative that has given these kids the skills to take their music wider than the four walls of our teenage section - and I love the fact that stuff like this goes on in communities like mine.


Street Dreams was introduced in 2009 after Lady Sheeq held a one-day music workshop at ‘Common Ground’, an annual youth event run by local youth and community organisations. It was so successful that they decided to turn it into a 12-week programme of workshops in 2010 and show the participants how to produce an EP.


In early February over 50 young people from Onehunga and surrounding areas auditioned for the programme with 15 being given the opportunity to record, mix and master their own track which would be compiled into an EP for release in May. The group has been meeting on Tuesday nights at the local community centre and we have seen the students grow from budding singer/songwriters to fully-fledged recording artists in a matter of months under the tutorage of local icons Lady Sheeq and Dei Hamo. They have been offered some serious skill building and been given advice around writing, recording and performing, as well as getting the chance to talk to sound engineers and producers from radio stations Flavaand Mai FM.


Perfectly situated at the end of Youth Week and New Zealand Music Month, the Street Dreams Launch is being held at theYMCA Jordan Recreation Centre on 28 May. These guys have done the work, recorded the tracks, had the photo shoots and now we are lucky enough to be able to get our hands on the EP.


The participants will be performing their songs for the first time on stage, with your MCs Dei Hamo and Lady Sheeq with performances by Erakah and DJ TDK. I suggest you take this opportunity to see them now before these talented youth become seriously huge.


Tickets are available at the Onehunga Community Centre office from 24 May, and are $15 for entry and copy of the E.P, or just $10 for a copy of the EP.


You can also follow their progress in the Onehunga Community News.


Thanks go to Auckland City Council and the Onehunga Business Association for the funding and support for this worthwhile initiative.

~Rachael

Basement music tours

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The Central City Library basement, traditionally hidden from the public eye, with more secrets than the Da Vinci Code, is open for investigation this NZ Music Month. Rumoured to be home to over 600,000 items, a significant corner of the basement holds more sheet music, scores, orchestral and choral sets than you can comprehend. Covering all genres of music, the collection also contains song anthologies, vocal scores and librettos for opera and musicals miniature and full scores, instrumental tutors, a strong New Zealand music collection, prints and manuscripts.

And this is the tip of iceberg.

If you’re a treasure-hunter, an archive-dreamer, or simply into underground music, make a booking today. Book online at the first floor enquiries in the Central City Library, or phone us on 307 7780.

~Matthew

Tony Paki song workshop at Glen Innes

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New Zealand Music Month isn't just an opportunity for the library to show off its sweet collections, and brag about all our influential friends. It's also an opportunity for us to do something that a lot of people don't instantly think of when they think about libraries: teach.

At community libraries around Auckland City we run Akozone homework centres, where school children can come and work on their homework and have a librarian on hand to help them out. On Wednesday 19 May local musician Tony Paki is stopping by the Glen Innes library to teach some of his songs, including a song he's written for Glen Innes.

Tony's a local, a father of three, and a member of the Tu Wharetoa, Te Arawa and Tuhoe tribes. He's been involved in music since he was young, getting started in a a Kapa Haka Group called Nga Tapuwae Junior Maori Club. We were lucky enough to get Tony along to share his love of music and Glen Innes with the Akozone kids. The workshop starts at 3pm on Wednesday 19 May, and is for under-13s.

If you've got the learning itch and can't be part of Tony's workshop, don't forget we've still got beginner's ukulele lessons at Central, and soon I'll be posting some information on our class on how to use the Naxos Music database.

~ Ashley

No excuse to stay home

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Great North. There’s plenty coming up throughout the Auckland City Libraries for Music Month. If you like tight, fresh rhythms and harmonies, get to Panmure Community Librarythis Sunday 16 May at 2pm, for Before It Melts, a group of nine Aucklanders who love to sing a cappella. They will perform an eclectic mix of both popular and less well-known numbers to clever new arrangements by Wendy Moore.

If you want to tap your toes to some jazz favourites and Latin dance tunes, make your way to Onehunga Community Library on Saturday 15 May at 11am for trumpet diva Edwina Thorne, an international recording artist with five albums to her credit.

Friday 14 May is all about dusty boots and broken hearts, with Cyril & Friends singing country favourites at Glen Innes Community Library at 11am. Not much later at Central, the city’s latest young talents, Great North will keep your feet dancing and put a tear in your beer. Great North gets started at 4pm.

With all these different performances over the city there are no excuses, people! Get out there and enjoy the music. Check What’s On: NZ Music Month for more and more events.

~Matthew

Nick Bollinger and the essentials of music lists

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A lot of the talk around Nick Bollinger's latest book, 100 Essential New Zealand Albums, seems to focus around how music lovers love to love lists, and how it's the hardest thing in the world to compare albums across time, genre and popularity. This is all true, but this all falls second to something I think we've all overlooked: music criticism and appreciation as conversation.

Each new album in Bollinger's book is introduced by an iTunes-style transport bar at the top of the page; a play button, back and forward, the volume on full. It's this reference to an album as a digital artifact that reminded me that most of the lists I see these days are online. Blogs, music sites, Facebook pages, this is the home of the top ten list for me. You can even make your own lists on this website, like this one called 'Kiwi music.' The best part about this is that allows for reply, for discussion, for defence and for outright flaming. We all come off being a hell of a lot more invested in the list, even if we still hate it.

Even print magazines like Rolling Stone and Q publish their lists online, and when they don't a reader will do it for them. That's because we want to discuss this stuff. Music listening is a relationship for us nerds, it's not a one-way street. And while yelling at a record won't change that record, yelling about a record can change how you relate to it.

When Bollinger talks at the Central City Libray on Thurdsay 13 May I hope it's more of a conversation than a lecture. It's all kicking off with a complimentary glass of wine, which I hope proves conducive to a little bit of back and forth on the subject. Bollinger is a pro, but he's not staying on the mountaintop. I'm not saying that he needs to be shouted down, but a little bit of back and forth can be a good thing. You might not change his mind on anything, but you might just make up yours.

Nick Bollinger is in the Central City Library this Thursday 13 May from 6pm. Bookings are recommended, phone 377 0209.

~Ashley

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